


An Ill Wind

by everyperfectsummer



Series: LOSF Diversity Week [2]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Chronic Illness, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-13 06:14:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11753724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyperfectsummer/pseuds/everyperfectsummer
Summary: He’s tired of people telling him that it gets better.





	An Ill Wind

**Author's Note:**

> trigger warnings for illness, medical mentions, vomit mentions, food mentions, poor parenting, negative view of Joe West, please let me know if there are others that I’m missing!  
> Also I straight up stole a lot of Joe’s behavior towards Barry from my parentals behavior towards me, because why project halfway when you can project all the way.  
> Betaed by lacommunarde, who’s amazing :)

The hardest part about having a chronic illness is that there is no better to strive for, no hope in sight of every being “well” in the long term. Sure, there are good days, days where he wakes up and can get out of bed without every muscle in his body complaining, days when he can eat normal food without throwing it right back up, days where he feels both “normal” and as though he can conquer the world. (And, god, if this is how normal people feel  _ all the time _ he doesn’t know why the human race hasn’t already achieved world peace and set up colonies on Mars).

 

But those are just good days, isolated incidents among the rest of his life. It’s never going to be the standard way things are. He’s never going to be “cured”, get better, get anywhere beyond managing his symptoms, and the hard part is that the people around him don’t accept that.

 

Joe’s always telling him to exercise more, eat healthier, “care more about your health,” as though the effort Barry puts in has any bearing on his health outcomes. He should question his doctors more, investigate his medication, “think critically about what the doctors tell you,” whatever that means.

 

“I’m serious, Bare,” Joe tells him, “if you’re going to go on a medication, you should know all it’s potential side effects, and the sort of lackluster effort you’re putting in doesn’t give me much confidence.”

 

Barry groans and flops back against the couch. Joe’s been making him memorize all the potential side effects of a medication before he’ll let him get on it for years now, but this latest one is four pages front and back, which is really eight pages if you think about it, which is really  _ way too many. _

 

“Ok, ok, I’ll spend some time looking over the list again,” he promises, because even though he has a chem test in the morning and should be studying for that he really, really wants to get on this new medication in the hope that it will somehow make things easier to deal with.

 

Iris eyes him sympathetically from across the room, but doesn’t step in. She’s better than Joe is about sickness things, more understanding of the fact that he’s trying as hard as he can, but there’s some things she just doesn’t get. There’s a gulf of health between them, and it’s hard to deal with, sometimes. She, like their father, still thinks that there  _ has _ to be a way to make things improve, and they just haven’t found it yet. For her, illness means a cold or the flu, something that you get and then get over, not something you live with day in day out, not something you know you will have until the end of your days.

 

So she researches, and she advises him on low exertion ways to exercise and cheap ways to eat healthy, and looks up new medications and freaks out about the side effects on his old ones, like he doesn’t already know what they are. She tells him to “think positive, Barry! It’ll get better!” and doesn’t realize that half of what could make it better relies on society changing, not his body.

 

He’s a good student, but he scrapes Bs in school because he spends so much time out sick, or at doctor’s appointments. He fails gym outright, unable to keep up and, with no official diagnoses, unable to get out of it.

 

The diagnoses issue is difficult. No doctor is sure what’s wrong with his body except a  _ lot _ , and while he has plenty of smaller diagnoses, he has no overarching one connecting the many things wrong in his body. Just – every bodily system that he has is broken in some small (or not so small) way.

 

But it’s hard, to tell people that he’s sick and not to be able to tell them that it’s x or y without telling them a laundry list of every single thing wrong with him. “Chronically ill,” is a good label, but one that he has to use quietly, because the Positivity Police disapprove.

 

There’s a joke that another chronically ill friend told him once, that for each chronically ill person there are three assigned Positivity Police, there to spout slogans like “drink more water!” and “have you tried pilates?” every time an ill person complains, or worse, describes themselves as chronically ill without having cancer. As though that’s the only illness that exists, or that people are allowed to have.

 

Barry’s Positivity Police include the Wests, his teachers, and, now that he’s working at the police station, half his coworkers. The other half are sure that he’s gaming the system somehow to try and get time off, as though exceptions are being made in his favor instead of the other way around.

 

No one’s allowed to come to work within 12 hours after throwing up, standard policy, but if he did that he’d never be at work, so he comes anyway. He throws up  _ at  _ work and just keeps on going, careful to never disturb the samples or his paperwork. Everyone knows about it, and some people tell him that he’s inspirational, which makes him feel uncomfortable, because he’s just trying to function in society and wouldn’t have to be inspiring if society would actually accommodate his needs.

 

Some parts of society, however, do. Or at least, that’s what he discovers when he’s struck by lightning. Super speed brings with it a host of problems. One is the metabolism; he has to eat five times what a normal human does, but his body still rejects roughly a third of what he puts in it. And, despite super healing, his esophagus is in a constant state of irritation, which Caitlin posits may be due to the fact that it’s his own stomach acid that’s causing the issue.

 

Caitlin, Cisco, and, ironically enough, the very criminals they fight against, are all understanding about his issues. On the days when he physically can’t get out of bed, either friend or foe (and sometimes both) are there with trays of water and whichever food he thinks he stands the best chance of being able to get down. When Barry has to stop mid-fight to throw up, Mick and Len are courteous enough to wait for him to stop. If he’s ready to keep fighting, they do, and if he says he can’t, then they don’t. They respect his boundaries, respect the fact that he is trying as hard as he can but also that effort doesn’t magically cure illness.

 

Cisco and Caitlin are scientists, have looked at his charts and his blood work and his meds and know that he’s sick. They’ve also seen him go up against every villain he can, literally including himself, and know that he is trying his best. Mick has burns, scars that will never heal. Len has things he won’t talk about, only allude to, left over from his father. Both of them understand living with pain that’s never going to go away. 

 

They’re not perfect, no one is and no one can be, but they’re better. They make him feel better, and as though a better is possible. Even though his body is never going to improve, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get better, as the world around him does. And that’s. That gives him hope. 


End file.
